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july 2008 Wrath & reasonIt can be tempting to pretend those difficult, often disconcerting, sometimes horrifying scenes in the Old Testament are superseded by the New Testament and aren't important to an understanding of the Bible. But, says Walter Brueggemann in the first of a two-part special article for Reform, they are essential to a full faith experience, warts and all
The church, in its conventional practice, mostly disregards the Old Testament. And yet it is clear, as the earliest church would have understood, that any reading of the New Testament without attention to the Old Testament is likely to be a misreading that results in serious distortion.
Take the covenant between God and God’s people, as a defining claim of both Testaments. In its various expressions, the covenant constitutes an ongoing dialogue between God and God’s people, and between God and God’s world, in which both parties are characteristically at risk in the relationship, and are pledged to mutual fidelity.
Central claims are made in the Old Testament concerning that dialogue, and these are important for a faithful reading of the New Testament.
Dangerous holiness
Popular readings of the New Testament imagine the cozy availability of God. But the God given to us in the Old Testament – and embodied in Jesus of Nazareth – is a God marked elementally by holiness. It is the holiness of God that precludes any coziness with the God known in Jesus, and can even be dangerous. Perhaps the most primitive presentation of such dangerous holiness is the curious narrative in II Sam. 6:6-8 in which even to touch the ark (upon which the invisible God sits) is to violate God and so to die.
But of course there are more “adult” articulations of God’s holiness given in the text. The God of Sinai is portrayed as an awesome God who is scarcely approachable and approached only at risk (see Exod 19:16-25). Indeed the approach is so ominous that Moses is promptly designated as a mediator, so that Israel does not need to face God directly (Exod 19:18-21). The confrontation at Sinai makes clear that God is remote from Israel and will not easily adapt to Israel’s expectations.
We might cite any number of texts that give nuance to divine holiness.
God is known in Israel to be a God who hides, who refuses to be present on occasion, perhaps with other worlds to govern, perhaps to attend to his own well-being without constant regard for Israel (Isa 45:15). At the same time, this God is intensely attentive, so that Israel on occasion can sense itself to be under surveillance, always under watch, always under demand. (Ps 139:7-12; Amos 9:2-4; Job 7:17-21).
Moral coherence
God is known to be capable of anger when his own reputation is violated or his purposes are disregarded (Jer 4:23-26). Divine anger, to be sure, constitutes an acute interpretive problem in the contemporary world, especially when it is said to spill over into devastating violence.
Even given that problem, however, that wrath of God is a way in the Bible of affirming that there is a non-negotiable moral coherence to creation that cannot be violated with impunity. And while we too often confuse our petty moralisms with that non-negotiable moral coherence, the claim is that God and God’s purposes will not be mocked.
This God, hidden and capable of anger, is at the same time a God of freedom, who need not conform to any human construct of consistency. On the one hand, it is clear in the divine response in Job 38-41 that God has no need to engage with Israel in any moral calculation or to give explanation. On the other hand, it is this very same divine freedom that permits God to reach out in graciousness and mercy beyond any commonsense adjudication of infidelity:
And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” (Exod 33:19)
This same holiness exhibited as hiddenness, anger, and freedom also allows that God may be received as an agent of inexplicable graciousness and mercy, the kind of reach that so infuriated Jonah (Jonah 4:1-2). Thus in Hosea 11:8-9, after God has been boisterous in anger, God reverses field as “the Holy One in Israel” who will not execute anger. In sum, this holy God exhibits and acts out an extraordinary range of qualities that keep the relationship open, somewhat on edge, and endlessly generative. It is this God whom we know to be bodied in the one from Nazareth.
Walter Brueggemann is emeritus professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, USA, and the author of over 58 books
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